Kickstarter Of The Day: Blackprints, Car Designs Reimagined (UPDATED)

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Spring has sprung: time to crack open the windows, break out the vacuum cleaner, and tidy up the old homestead.

If all goes well, once you've sent off the old clothes and clutter to Goodwill, you'll be left with a good bit of empty space. We suggest refilling a portion of it with sleek prints of -- what else? -- classic cars.

Artist Sabrina Chun has launched a Kickstarter project to fund a new series of prints featuring eight classic rides, ranging from the Ford Model T to the Lamborghini Countach. She's even included a couple of movie cars, like the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 and, of course, the DeLorean from Back to the Future. (Fans of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, you'll just have to wait.)

What separates Chun's work from the sort of car photography found on dorm room walls around the globe is her minimalist aesthetic. Chun takes images of these great cars, grayscales them, then adjusts the light levels until everything in the photo is either black or white. What we're left with is the car's outline rendered in white on a stark black background. Like Pop Art of the 1960s, Chun lets us focus on the beauty of the car's form.

So far as we can see, the only downsides to Chun's project are (a) it's on Kickstarter, meaning that it won't happen unless it's fully funded, and (b) the project deadline isn't for another 59 days, so even if it's successful, backers won't get their prints until sometime after that.

That said, one day into the project, and Chun has already met about 10% of her goal. Have a look at the video overview above, and chip in if you're so inclined.

UPDATE: Some eagle-eyed car fans spotted the source photos that Chun may have used to create her work. We're not lawyers, but if she did "borrow" those images -- even if she substantially reworked them -- she probably violated U.S. copyright law. (Shepard Fairey was found guilty of similar transgressions in creating his Obama "Hope" prints a few years ago.) Nothing's definitive yet, but Kickstarter has disabled Chun's campaign until the copyright dispute is resolved.